Parsons School of Design

Carolina Obregón is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Fashion. She has a master's degree in Fashion and Sustainability from Aalto University in Finland. In 2014, she designed, developed and implemented the first undergraduate program in Sustainable Fashion & Management in Latin America at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, in Colombia. As an assistant professor at Universidad de los Andes, she co-lead the winning teams at the Biodesign Challenge with Woocoa, the vegan wool, the overall prize with NanoFreeze, a protein-based refrigeration system, and in 2020 MANA with Linneo, a bio-nutricosmetic obtained from fungi pigments. She is part of the startups NanoFreeze and E.biodye (bacteria-based textile dye).

Jane Pirone is an Associate Professor of Design Ecologies at Parsons School of Design. She served as Dean of the School of Design Strategies from 2015-2019 and as Director of the Communication Design program from 2006-2011. Jane’s creative and transdisciplinary practice engages with living systems, storytelling, participatory futures, and new technologies from critical, queer and post-human theoretical perspectives. Jane has been a founding member of the Datamyne Project (MYNE), the Urban Research Toolkit (URT), the urbanBIKE initiative, and YouthBike. Prior to joining Parsons, Jane was the founder/creative director of Not For Tourists, drummergirl.com, and the award winning design firm, Happy Mazza Media, working with clients such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, IBM, Nickelodeon, and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.

Harpreet Sareen is a scientist, artist, and educator based in New York. His work is situated at the intersection of material science, biology, and electronics and draws on the complementary abilities of the biological and artificial worlds. Harpreet terms this as 'Convergent Design' to create hybrid substrates and bionic materials that lend themselves for future ecological machinery, sensing systems, and interaction design. Harpreet is an assistant professor of Interaction and Media Design at Parsons School of Design, New York. He also directs the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab that focuses on biological futures, their implications in interaction design, and the cybernetics of organisms and materials.